With the extremely successful commercial acceptance of wireless messaging communication devices, such as modern pagers, wireless communicators, cellular phones, and mobile telephones, wireless messaging is fast becoming a common form of communication. Packet data radio services on cellular systems, for example, has enabled greater connectivity to corporate services such as email, web browsing, and file transfers, where a significant amount of message data is available to be delivered to a portable wireless messaging communication device. Having the capability to remotely read email enhances worker productivity for people on the move away from the desks.
Due to user preferences for smaller devices, portable wireless messaging communication devices continue to reduce in size. Users prefer smaller devices so as to enhance the portability of the devices on a person. The smaller size of contemporary devices normally leads to a small display screen size.
A significant problem encountered when using a wireless messaging communication device with a small display screen is that reading messages, especially the larger messages received such as via email messaging and web downloads, tends to cause a user of the device to constantly interact with a user input interface such as via buttons, keys, joysticks, navigation wheels, and other input devices, to read an email message or other lengthy message via the display.
For example, in conventional cellular phone systems, reading an email message requires a user to constantly activate a scroll down button to read a message via the display. The scroll down message capability is very limited so the user must activate a request for more message download to the device to cause the device to fetch an additional portion of the lengthy message from the wireless communication system server to be able to continue reading the remainder of the message via the display. This fetch request requires the user to activate more buttons and then the user has to wait for the additional message to be downloaded over the air from the wireless communication system server. Regrettably, reading the entire lengthy message entails numerous activations of buttons on the cellular phone device plus extensive waiting times for additional message data to be downloaded to the cellular phone device.
Contemporary wireless messaging devices have attempted to reduce the amount of button activations and related frustration to a user, by significantly increasing the size of a display screen, such as the larger screens on PDA-like devices, to view a larger message on the display screen. Additionally, large amounts of message memory are used to download the entire message into the device to avoid the wait times. Both of these solutions have greatly added cost and size to wireless messaging devices, such as cellular phones, which is contrary to the consumer demands thereby reducing the commercial viability of these solutions in the marketplace.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.